 So I have the pleasure of introducing to you Don Boudreau. Don Boudreau, as everybody knows, is the very active boss of the foundation of economic education. He has done a lot of good things at the helm of these institutions. In particular, the publishing of this booklet on Bastia. No, the translation of one other masterpiece of Bastia that I spoke about this morning. The only mistake perhaps that he has done is to change the free men into ideas for liberty. But perhaps he will explain why to us. Anyway, you probably also all know that Don is going to become the department head of one of the most prestigious university in the United States, prestigious as far as classical liberal thinking is concerned. Don? Thank you, Jacques. It's a genuine honor to be here. And I want to thank Diana Dupuis publicly for translating and making available Bastia's profession of faith to the electors of Saint-Severre. It's a marvelous document. It's the first time it's seen the light of day in English and it's only appropriate that FI be the publisher. And those of you who don't walk away from here with a copy, I will be sure to send you a copy if you want one free of charge. It's an excellent translation. And if I do say so myself, I think that we as FI did a nice job in printing it. So thank you, Jacques. It's an honor to be here speaking at an ISEFAL conference. It's my first time to attend such a conference. And it is an honor to be among such a wonderful audience, to be before such a wonderful audience and to be among such terrific speakers. Jacques made one mistake, however. He said that you would get a rest by listening to someone who speaks reasonably good English. Well, it's not me. Unfortunately, I speak even worse French as I speak no other language other than my modest attempt to speak my native language, which is my grandfather's native language was French, but he didn't pass that along to his successors in life. I will, it wasn't planned, but I will say a word about why I did change the title of the magazine from The Freeman to Ideas on Liberty. And I'll say a word about it because it actually, I can tie it in, I think, to my theme. Because my theme, the title of my talk is resisting the power of big government or something similar to that. And my theme is the power of ideas. Ideas are powerful, and I'm going to make that case in just a moment. But just as good ideas can be powerful, so too can bad or pernicious or mistaken ideas be powerful. And one thing we found in the United States, I don't think it made its way here, but it was certainly true in the U.S. and I learned this from a great deal of personal experience, with first hand and second hand hearing it through friends of the foundation, was that the name The Freeman, since 1995, had become tainted. It had become associated in the popular mind with radical, in the worst sense of the term, violent, racist, bigoted, narrow-minded, anti-liberal militia groups, some of whom had set up, most of whom had set up their points of operation in the western parts of the United States. I would go about to various audiences and speak, and I would introduce myself. I'm Don Boudreau, president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Our flagship operation is our marvelous monthly magazine, The Freeman. And then young people, particularly young people who had never before heard of fee or the freedom philosophy, as we like to call it, and these are the people that I want to attract. I want to bring in to our world of ideas, they would look up. Then afterward, many of them would come up to me and say, you know, what is this? Some kind of militia group? The reason was because in early 1996, actually it was, there was a group out in Montana that called itself the Free Men, F-R-E-E-M-E-N, and they got a great deal of press attention. All the major newspapers, all the television programs, the TV news programs, and that name somehow, regrettably, but somehow became associated in the popular mind, not with a thinking, rational, long-lived civil tradition of freedom that we are part of, but instead with a radical, fairly, very thoughtless, mindless, violent tradition. And I reflected somewhat, and I thought, what's my purpose? What is fee's purpose? Fee's purpose is to promote liberty, and to promote liberty means we have to get the ideas out to people who aren't yet exposed to those ideas, and if anything stands in the way of that task, I will get rid of it. Unfortunately, the name, I believe, stood in the way of that task. The purpose of fee was not to promote the name, the Freeman, it was to promote the ideas of liberty. So we renamed our magazine, Ideas on Liberty. I appreciate Jacques's regret that we had to get rid of the name. I too regret it, but I do think it was the right move. Thank you. Bertrand earlier, I'll take my watch off and look at the time, but I understood Jacques's earlier command to be very precise. Earlier, Bertrand gave a very nice talk on the role of ideas and the role of special interest groups. And in listening to Bertrand, I realized I have to amend slightly my talk, but that's okay. It actually helps what I plan to do. Some of what I say will parallel Bertrand. I hope, though, in a way that complements rather than substitutes for what he said. I was early on, well, I'm an economist by training, and early on I became very influenced by the public choice school. My first job was at George Mason University, and I arrived there after the Public Choice Center, with Jim Buchanan and Dwight Lee and Gordon Tullock and other luminaries, arrived in Fairfax, Virginia. And I became very influenced by this school of thought. One reason why I'm excited about returning to George Mason is because the public choice influence there, including the people Buchanan, Tullock, are still there. Those of you who know public choice know that one of the, I think it now to be a danger, it's one to be avoided. A danger of public choice is that if you're not careful, it makes you too pessimistic. It makes you fatalistic about the world. You know the basic public choice story, which I think is fundamentally correct. It says, look, if you want to understand the state, if you want to understand why the state does what it does, take off your rose colored glasses, or rosé colored glasses. Take off your ideological and romantic blinders. Understand that there is a logic, an economic logic to what the state does. Concentrated interest groups use the state as an apparatus to plunder the producers of wealth who are not as well organized. And you can read about most of, most everything that the state does. And if you look hard enough, you can find a public choice story to explain that fact. Certainly in the short run, if you want to explain what the state does today, what it will do tomorrow, what it will do a year from now, public choice is the place to start and probably the place to end. It is the explanation. However, I don't think it's the full and complete story. I think public choice scholars tend to take their story just a bit too far. Because they say really, look, ideas don't matter at all. Impersonal forces, the impersonal logic of the political process is all that drives the state. I don't think that's true. I think ultimately ideas do matter. Ideas do in fact constrain what the state can do. It's not easy. And this is not necessarily, incidentally, a happy thought. Ideas can be bad, as I said earlier. There are ideas, history is full of dangerous and disgusting ideas that have led to the slaughter and plunder of millions of people. But on the other hand, it gives us some hope that with good ideas and spreading those good ideas about widely enough, we can save ourselves from the state. We can save ourselves from the public choice forces that are otherwise pushing the state to plunder us. And just, I just want to share with you a few, these are anecdotes, but as someone mentioned earlier today, anecdotes are a sound part of thinking. A few facts to support my claim that ideas matter. And then I'll go on beyond that to show how I try to affect ideas and what modest ways that I can. First and most obviously, and again I apologize for the provincialism of my examples. I'm an American and most Americans of course are very provincial. We see only the United States and other parts of the world are out there. But I'm sure that what I'm about to say applies even in the most, at least most of the repressive regimes today. Whenever the government does something that to our eyes, to the eyes of a libertarian or a classical liberal or a free market conservative even, whenever the government does something that to our eyes is plunder, we say obviously it's the result of special interest groups and it is when we understand the world in the way that we do. If I look at the United States government restricting severely the amount of sugar that Americans can import from abroad, I know why the government's doing that. The government's doing that in order to raise the incomes of American sugar farmers. That's the only reason the government's doing that. But, and that's just one example of course among millions, what does the government say? It puts a public interest explanation on it. It says, oh, we're doing this in order to promote American wealth or to promote a better balance of trade. If the pure public choice story where all there is to the story, if it were the complete explanation, government would not have to insult us with its explanations. It would simply say, we're prohibiting the importation of sugar because we're getting paid off by this concentrated sugar lobby. It wouldn't bother to spend what resources it spends and what effort it expands to attempt to justify these stories in the way they justify them. Every bit of government plunder you find, certainly 99.9% of instances of government plunder, I'm sure is explained publicly for public consumption as something that promotes the public welfare. We all know it not to be true, but the fact that the government explains its plunder so consistently in public welfare terms indicates that the government understands that ideas matter. If ideas didn't matter again, they would just be very, the politicians and bureaucrats would be very blatant about the reasons for doing the kinds and sorts of plunder that they do. Ideas, I believe, affect the culture, and the culture ultimately determines the bounds within which the state can act. Leon Lowe was sitting at lunch today with Dwight Lee and I, and he just made an offhand comment. He said, I can't do a good South African accent, so I won't try. But Leon said, you know, one thing great about France is that, and I take his word on this to be true. I don't know it for a fact if you disagree, blame Leon. He said, it's illegal to smoke inside buildings in France, but people do it anyway. That's a cultural thing. You can pass a piece of legislation saying in French, you know, thou shalt not smoke inside of public buildings, but if people are doing it anyway without any obvious concern that the police are going to come in and snuff out the cigarette or put you in the Bastille, then that indicates that culture matters, that what is written on the legislative page is not the sole determinant of the laws of a society. I come from New Orleans, thus my name in French heritage, South Louisiana, which is thoroughly French, and actually surprisingly still thoroughly French in its laissez-faire attitudes towards certain aspects of life, drinking. The legal drinking age is seven. The de facto legal drinking age is seven, although most of us start much earlier than that. My wife is from Northern New Jersey, just outside of New York City, and the first time I took her to visit my parents in New Orleans ten years ago, we were driving by right on the street near where my parents live, and we passed an establishment that I had known all of my life, but had never paid any attention to because it was just so obvious. It was part of the landscape that didn't register with me, and my wife looked at it and she literally gasped. What is that? What's wrong? Did we just pass a movie prop? You know, something set up for filming a movie. I said, no, no one films movies in these parts. What she saw was, and I hope this makes sense to a non-American, the non-Americans in New Orleans, she saw a drive-up daiquiri shop. Daiquiri is a drink, you know, it's a cold drink, it's kind of sweet, but it's loaded with alcohol. So a drive-up daiquiri shop with a marquee in front that said, special, buy two, get one free. And it didn't register with me. I thought, of course this is unusual. Of course it's illegal. I'm absolutely certain you can pour over all the official books in the state of Louisiana coming out of Baton Rouge, and you can find several places in which it's illegal to operate drive-up daiquiri shops, and yet they've been operated for as long as I've lived, and they're still there. The culture of my fellow citizens, I no longer live there, but the culture of my family and the people who live around my family in the New Orleans area simply would not tolerate the state saying you can't drink and you can't conveniently drive up to a shop to get three or four daiquiris. I think this is encouraging, particularly if you like daiquiris and drinking. I think it's encouraging because it shows the power of ideas. Again though, to be serious, there's a danger that the ideas can be bad as well as good. In this case I actually think they're good. I think it's healthy to have something less than a puritanical attitude toward intoxicants. But you can have bad ideas too. So we want, I tell you this is all really, all by way of prefertory remarks. I think we should all leave this conference and leave the rest of our lives confident that everything we can do to promote the ideas of liberty will have some positive chance of affecting the world we live in. Ours is not a fatalistic enterprise. The governmental beast is not destined to win and destined by some ineluctable forces of nature to continue to grow and devour the wealth and liberty that it devours. We can change that. Now, that does not mean, and here's a trap we often fall into, and I can say that because I am the first to fall into this trap with great frequency. We tend to think that in order to change the world, we have to make the world perfect in our view. That we have to get people to become libertarians or that we have to get, or to move in substantial directions toward that end. Or that we have to get lots of people to adopt our views. We certainly have to get more. We want to get as many as possible. We want to persuade all those whom we persuade to be as consistently libertarian as Bastiat was. But victory, which is always measured at the margin, I'm an economist, victory does not require a complete transformation of everyone's thought. We don't have to have the entire world or the entire citizenry of America or Europe or other countries walking around with copies of economic soft-isms and the law emblazoned in their minds. I once saw in a little demonstration, a metaphor of sorts, done by Jose Pinera, the great Chilean who was responsible for privatizing 20 years ago, incidentally, almost to the date, Chile's, 21 years ago, Chile's pension system. And Jose said, look, he's a, those of you who know Jose know, he's a wonderful man, he's very persuasive. Like all analogies, this one's not perfect, but it's a very nice one. We were sitting at a dinner table and he put a fork on his finger. He said, this is a lever. I'm going to hold, I'm going to do this with a pen, an ink pen. No, I'm not going to do it, I shouldn't have had that glass of wine from New Orleans. And he balanced the pen on his finger and was tilted in one direction. And he said, suppose our goal, suppose we identify our goal as tilting the balance away from this current direction to here. How do we do that? So one way to do it is to take all, and imagine people standing all along this pen, this ink pen. We could change the balance simply by grabbing a bunch of the people here on the far end on this side and transferring them over here so that it plops down really fast. That would be nice if we could do it. But we don't have to do that. We can tip the balance without doing that. If you imagine the tip this way, all we have to do is get, we could tip the balance just by getting everyone, or many people, to move slightly in this direction. It doesn't even have to be that anyone crosses the line. If we have enough on this side and this person on the far, or from your perspective, the far left shifts just a little bit toward the right. Just a little bit from the extreme status position. Hyper-ultra, never seen a state intervention I never liked to. Hyper-ultra, well there may be one state intervention I don't like. Shift a little bit in this way. If enough people do that, that balance can tip. It might tip slowly, but it eventually can tip. And that's what we have to do. We get people to get them to see at the margin the merits of the market and the merits of freedom as opposed to the merits of plunder and coercion. My good friend Dwight Lee points out that if it tips, you get a further effect that lots of people just sort of slide down automatically. Actually I think there's something to that. So we get those who are willing to think to move a little bit and then hope that if we get the actual tipping in our direction that lots of the people who aren't really thinkers just go along with everyone to go along, that they'll just sort of slide in our direction. It'd be a happy day if we do that. Anyway, how to affect ideas. Each of us have our own ways. Each of us has our own audience. My audience at fee and in the college classroom where I was before fee and where I will be after I leave fee in a month are principally young people. And I think long and hard, I don't know how successfully but long and hard about how to best most effectively given my skills persuade young people of the merits of liberalism. It's difficult for lots of reasons. One of the most pernicious barriers to sound thinking today among young people of course is the extent to which the environmental movement has become religious on thinking. I've talked to lots of young people who actually describe themselves as free market libertarians except when it comes to the environment. And then suddenly the environmental exception grows so large that there's nothing left to their free market environmentalism. They cannot because of the religiosity of that view come to accept the market as the best means of allocating resources and so I think well what do I do? How do I get kids, young people to see the merits of the market and to understand that the market is not this terrific polluting device that is making life miserable. My specialty in economics is not environmental economics. But I can point to, I read this stuff written by my buddies at the Political Economy Research Center and at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and at other free market organizations, Cato. And I can point to studies that show that in fact sulfur dioxide emissions in the west are lower today than they were 20 years ago and they were lower 20 years ago than they were 40 years ago. I can point to the fact that the number of trees on the North American continent is in fact increasing and has been increasing for several decades. I can point to the fact that 99% or something thereabouts of all species that have ever existed since the beginning of time are now extinct and that all the recent extinctions don't add much to that percentage. That's all valuable and I do do that and I will continue to do that. But it occurred to me there's an even more fundamental point to make. There's more fundamental point and I can tell it to you without worrying about the effect I will soon tell you about. But here's how I like to state my more fundamental point in a rather provocative way. That if you go back to our pre-industrial past and you look at the kinds of pollution that affected our pre-industrial ancestors, our ancestors who lived in that happy day before commerce and industry, soiled human life, they, and if you showed them, if you showed our pre-industrial ancestors anywhere, pre-industrial ancestors incidentally anywhere in the globe, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, you showed them the way we live and explained to them even the almost extreme environmental problems that the Greens today talk about, they, our ancestors, would be deliriously happy to exchange the environmental problems that they suffer for the ones that we suffer. They would be deliriously happy to have to worry about the extinction of a snail or even global warming or even genuine water pollution of the kind that we have today compared to the kinds of environmental problems they have. I try when I have young people before me to paint a picture as vividly as I can of the pre-industrial past and to point out that that pre-industrial past was filthy, foul, and hazardous. So much so that we today in the industrialized West can hardly imagine it. And I say to these young people, as I'll say to you for a moment, oh, before I go on, here's what I wanted to, I mean, I gave a version of this talk in Montreal to a student assembly, 210 students assembled by the Frazier Institute. And this talk was in Montreal. And in the middle of my talk, about one-third of the students became so offended. This is true. They seized the microphone from me. They turned off the lights and they started screaming. I was cursed out bilingually, French in English. I understood the English curse words and I even understood the French curse words because that's the one bit of French that my grandfather continued to speak to me. And these kids couldn't handle it. But I actually take a bit of hope from this because it got to them so much that it bothered them. And here's what I asked the students to do. I said, come back with me to our pre-industrial time. Not the nobility. Actually, we can even tell horrible stories about the nobility and the royalty. But to ordinary Europeans, the ancestors of all of us in this room, ordinary Europeans, ordinary Africans or Asians, to pre-industrial times and just look at what we know about the way these people lived. The typical European peasant and most Europeans in the Middle Ages prior to the Industrial Revolution were peasants, lived in a small one room hut. Typical one throughout most of Europe, most of Northern Europe, Northwestern Europe, was 20 feet long. I don't know what this translates to in that weird metric system. 20 feet long by 14 feet wide was one room. It had a dirt floor. Its walls were made of earthen materials, twigs, mud, dob. Its roof was thatched. Almost all of them. And we know this from archeological digs. I've seen pictures of these, of several of these digs. Almost all of these huts had a manure trench that was built right, not down the middle, but about one third of the way through the hut, running sideways, a manure trench. Because, particularly in the winter, the farm animals, many of the farm animals, lived in the house with the family. Now just start picturing this without going any further. One room, dirt walls, dirt floor, a thatched roof. There are no windows. Peasants could not afford window panes. The wire meshed screen had not yet been invented. It's a good thing they had no windows, because having no wire meshed screens, had they opened their windows, had they cut a hole into the wall to let fresh air in. They would have gotten fresh air, but they would have also gotten pestilential swarms of insects. And they had a sleeping on dirt floors, no furniture, the thatched roof. Now a lot of Americans, I assume maybe Europeans today too, a lot of Americans get very romantic and teary-eyed with their peasant roofs. We think they're wonderful. You can go into a greeting card store and you look at little greeting cards, there's a thatched roof with the smoke coming out. You can imagine the happy peasant sitting inside, drinking their tea. And really, you know, enjoying, enjoying their non-commercial life, unspoiled by the troubles and hazards that be set us today. But here's a description of a thatched roof from the historians Joseph and Francis Geis. This is from a book entitled Life in a Medieval Village, published by Harper and Row in 1990. These two historians, incidentally, have no particular brief to carry for the free market. I don't know their political ideology, but they're not particularly libertarian, I can tell you. And listen to this description that I quote directly. Speaking of medieval Europe, rues were thatched as from ancient times with straw, broom, or heather, or in marsh country with reeds or rushes. Fatched roofs had formidable drawbacks. They rotted from alternations of wet and dry and harbored a menagerie of mice, rats, hornets, wasps, spiders, and birds. And above all, they caught fire. Yet even in London, they prevailed until the 18th century. So just imagine that. You're living on this, you're sleeping on a dirt floor, you have no furniture, you live under a thatched roof with all these animals in there dying and falling on you, urinating and defecating on you. It's a good thing this is not an after-dinner speech. During the summer, incidentally, the walls of the hut would likely be coated with animal dung in order to repel fleas. It didn't work perfectly, but apparently it did repel fleas a bit. It was a filthy, foul existence. Of course, there was no running water. There was no indoor plumbing. There was no artificial lighting. I can tell you from personal experience, if you sit young people in front of you and you ask them the following question, you say, how many of you bathe regularly? I think it's a trick question. Everybody bathes regularly. Well, you know, if you were your ancestors, your European ancestors, just a few generations ago, they bathed in October, and then... Maybe that's one of my ancestors. They bathed in October, depending on where they lived. It could be a little bit later, but they bathed in streams, not with soap, they had no soap. They bathed in streams that took the run-off from the farm animals grazing on the hills. It really wasn't what we consider a bath. And then they didn't bathe again until March or April, when the streams became warm again. Of course, they're not washing their hair, and you ask a 17-year-old girl or boy, I say, wouldn't you love to go on a date? I remember when I was 17 years old, I wouldn't go outside the house unless I washed my hair that morning. That really gets to kids. They say, hmm, maybe life back then wasn't as delightful as we think it as we think it might have been. Of course, they weren't brushing their teeth. I used to say a few years ago when giving a variation on this lecture that we today, born from the mid-20th century on are the first generations in human history who can expect to keep our teeth for our entire lives. That's actually not true. For most of human history, people could expect to keep their teeth for their entire lives. The trouble is their entire lives were some 35 or 40 years ago. We are the first generations in human history. Those of us born from approximate, at least in America, maybe a bit different from Europe, but I'm sure it's close. People born from about 1935 on are the first people in human history who, if they live into their mid-80s, can expect, with a fair degree of certainty, to have all or most of their teeth healthy in their head when they die. How many of you in here have seen the movie Dances with Wolves? Not good. I hate that movie. This is not pre-industrial times, although it was set in a pre-industrial setting, the American Midwest in the late 19th century. The cinematography was truly wonderful. It was a beautifully filmed movie and the vistas were gorgeous to look at. There's one scene in the movie, I believe it occurred near the end of the movie, where the Kevin Costner character, the European who finds nobility living among the savages, he's with a group of, I can say Indians in this room, American Indians, Barun, I don't mean your folk. You can't say Indians in the United States. You really can't. It's like cursing. So you have to say Native Americans and I point out, well, I'm a Native American. Anyway, there's a scene where the Kevin Costner characters with several American Indians, two or three of these Indians were older. They looked to me to be in their 60s or 70s. I mean the actors were that old. And the camera is panning around this group and they're talking to each other and at one point someone makes a joke and causes them all to laugh and smile. And what I noticed, I looked at the teeth of every one of these people and even in the older Indians, the 16, 17 year old Indians, each one of them had a set of full straight healthy white teeth. And you think, what a distortion. There was no European or no American in New York City that age in 1885 who had a full set of healthy straight white teeth. There was certainly no person living on the American planes 130 years ago, 120 years ago with their full set of teeth. But we get this distortion and we see them think, oh, wouldn't life be great back then? And you think that if you don't reflect on the fact that well, it might be great. You don't have to do any traffic jams. You don't have any sulfur dioxide in your hair. But you also won't have any teeth in your head. One of my great heroes is the late Julian Simon and he pointed out that perhaps the worst pollutants ever to affect humankind were diseases that have largely been either eliminated or reduced to insignificance in the industrialized west. Smallpox. Perhaps, well, certainly one of the greatest killers of all time. I don't know where it ranks, but it must be up there in one or two. Smallpox was devastating. I read a quotation from actually one of my favorite historians, the late French historian, Fernand Braudel who I read the English translation in his book, The Structures of Everyday Life. Let's say I have only five minutes. Braudel wrote about smallpox. I'm quoting now directly. He says, in 1775 when an oculation was just beginning to be discussed a medical book considered smallpox to be the most general of all diseases 95 in every hundred people were affected. One in seven died. No one, end quote, no one today dies of smallpox. No one in the world it's been eliminated. A good case can be made, the capitalism eliminated it by creating the leisure and science and wealth required to do the exploration and the investigation for the inoculation. One in seven people died of smallpox. No one does today. Tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis, malaria. These things in the industrialized west have been reduced to insignificance. Some of them still exist, but they don't kill people to the extent that they killed people in the past. The great Bastiat, had he been born a hundred years earlier would almost certainly not have died at the age of 49. Then suddenly we can say that not only has capitalism reduced the kinds of pollution that made people feel miserable and killed them it's given us indoor plumbing it's given us toothpaste it's giving us dental floss and mouthwash it's given us air conditioning it's given us antibiotics I can't, I don't have time to list them all, but I also like to say and I'll close on this thought that capitalism has also made us beautiful. It's a great beautifier of the human person. Our standards today of personal beauty are quite different from the standards of our pre-industrial ancestors. We are taller we're straighter none of us I dare say well none of us have faces pockmarked with smallpox 500 years ago 95 of every 100 of us did we keep our teeth we're clean we don't have scabbies or ringworms ringworm on our skin we probably don't have headlights 500 years ago it's estimated the incidence of headlights was about a hundred percent people scratch, they lost their hair they were hunched over because of medical ailments also because of malnutrition when young people worry about the kinds of pollutants that are being emitted even if we grant for the sake of argument that these problems are genuine some of them are and that they must be addressed it's fair to say but look what we've gotten in return in return despite sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide our world is vastly cleaner much less hazardous and much more pretty you young person who laments the industrial age and would like to go back to living in a local non-commercial society you would be horrified if you went back for two or three days you would come screaming back to the industrialized west here I get to satisfy Hubert's request I get to mention Ayn Rand that person would come running back to the industrialized west and buy the first copy of Atlas Shrug they got his hands on thank you very much this is only a footnote which I'm sure you would have added if you'd thought of it and in the case of malaria the continued incidence of that is due to the United States government which outlawed DDT after stopping the shipments of DDT it sprang right back up and of course there are only three Lankans and other brown people a couple million of those can get killed every year no problem that's good old US Congress Jan points out exactly true I thought of this when I mentioned malaria and because of time I didn't explain further but in fact malaria is on the rise in some places the government has outlawed DDT DDT is it's one of the poster pesticides for the environmental movement what a terrible thing isn't it wonderfully outlawed DDT Rachel Carson author of Silent Spring she can rest easily because she helped to outlaw DDT but then we can say you helped to kill people otherwise we'd be alive because malaria is back on the rise hi Don last night we were handed sheet of paper from the communists yes attack the attackers with a diagram of the Laffer curve with the idea being that perhaps a reduction in taxes can increase the amount of plunder for the state to the one side of the curve or an increase in taxes might increase the amount of plunder and that the idea that people would argue for perhaps even a tax reduction or tax rate reduction for the reason that it would increase the amount of plunder is disturbing to me and while I'm for tax reductions I mean clearly these people three premises ahead they're starting their reasoning process several premises ahead of where most of us start our reasoning process and I wonder if you might address address that yeah I'm not a public finance economist but my friend Dwight Lee who's sitting in the back of the audience and probably can't hear me because he's deaf Dwight, that's a joke Dwight Dwight wrote a paper several years ago with Jim Buchanan making this making a very similar point it's an interesting I don't have anything profound to add it's an interesting theoretical point that if government tax rates are too high now for whatever reason and if those rates are reduced and then government revenue rises well that's not necessarily a good thing rates might rates fall, maybe productive activity increases that's the good side because more resources at its disposal it's a real question whether that's a benefit or not I don't know how to do the utilitarian calculus at the extreme we might hope let's go the full way your humor, your radical status frenzy let's go the whole way, let's have 100% confiscation of everything and then maybe such an extreme position would cause the state to lose all authority and all resources and that might be the way to get to the libertarian utopia but it's possible that reducing taxes can actually increase state plunder although let me say as a practical I'll say what FY Edgeworth, the great British economist said 120 years ago about the optimal tariff argument, yes it's true but it should be bottled in one of those little jars with skull and crossbones stuck in the back of the medicine chest there's a theoretical possibility I think it's true but I would never imagine myself arguing against tax rate reductions on that grounds thank you Peter I think it was Joseph Goebbels who once said a lie will be believed by anybody it does have to be a very big lie the bigger the lie the more people believe it and I think we are surrounded by a few of those lies at the moment in the environmental side of it and your example of the fork being tilted only by pushing a few people just a little bit misses the point a bit I think because you need a sledge hammer or maybe an ideological atom bomb to get rid of these big lies because if you just push a bit push them a bit all that we need will come next will be someone with another big idea based on the same false ideas like a film like Kevin Costner's Dancers With Wolves for example which conveys all these ideas what we need is sledge hammer ideas which remove these big lies I think I agree with you in part to keep the analogy going what you are pointing out is that the actual force you need to move some of these people no matter how far you move them I just used my finger I was gently pushing them maybe that won't work maybe they are just glued there with super glue and you need or a punch by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Tyson to move them I agree in most part with that I think it is very difficult I didn't mean to give you a misleading impression that it is very easy to move these people our task is not a simple one it is not merely going out to the man on the street and say hey our European ancestors lived under that roof that was pretty bad oh yeah really okay I am going to vote for the Libertarian candidate in the next election I don't there may be one or two people like that but they are very very rare but I would take exception or I confess to having a bit of a red flag that went up in my mind I don't think that we win many adherents by being Sledge Hammerish it is fun to be Sledge Hammerish it really is it is fun to ridicule people and point out how stupid or evil they are and some people sure that is what they deserve but in general for most thinking people well meaning people I think this describes most folks most of the people whom we have to get to if we are going to have a real effect most of these people I believe are well meaning they don't they are not introduced to our thoughts yet I think most can be persuaded if we do a good enough job there are a few whom you cannot move from the status position even with an atom bomb okay let's not bother it would be fun for vindictive purposes to get atom but if we do Sledge Hammerish for everyone I think we come across as too heavy handed we come across as intolerant I believe that we precisely because we are the only truly consistent proponents of the civil society we have to do our best to be civil to put our faith in rational argument and I know that's difficult I know it's sometimes it's very difficult when I hear people talk sometimes by the by the neck and do unspeakable things to them but I don't do that because I don't think it would win us any adherence I don't have a recipe beyond that other than to say avoid if you can being heavy handed put your trust in rational argument we have truth on our side we have all the evidence on our side we have great thinkers we have a lot on our side and that should be enough we have to be patient but better better to patiently get people to move to this position and then have them really want to be here rather than to Sledge Hammer them over which means that they can just as easily be bounced to Sledge Hammered right back thank you Josey okay thank you Mary Lou because this question brings me to the one who didn't let me because of the time Bertrand Léminice was talking about the politicians and that they have empty brains and someone also later said that it's even worse they have it full of it okay and I think that is not the battle we have to fight it has to be a battle of ideas not against people and we cannot alineate the politicians because otherwise there is no way to win so I comment on that but my question actually you talked a lot about history and that now we have more trees than maybe 50 years ago but certainly we have less trees than 200 years ago so this is in a way like a cycle okay or that is what I think that sometimes so many of these processes go in cycles it's not a linear evolution so my question is the second one is what do you think is the next trend for the future of Liberty will there be more Liberty there will be less Liberty as you know in Europe all the governments now are socialist and we even have in France a trust guide the prime minister how do you see freedom especially in Europe I think is very worrying and other parts of the world thank you this is a good question and it's a question that lots of all of us I'm sure asked and it's a question that I've been asked many times I truly don't have a firm answer I can only give you my sense but it's not a sense that I have with any great degree of confidence I am cautiously optimistic about the history of Liberty I've been in this movement now for 25 years well 24 since 1977 and if I look back over that time period and focus on it as a whole rather than just what's happening today or what's happened over the past year I detect progress progress not only in the number and quality of people who are joining the liberal movement but also some progress however halting it may be maybe this is a provincially American view some progress in the terms of the debate not on all issues but someone mentioned earlier the California power the power issue I believe, I can't prove this, it's my sense I believe that had we had this mess in California 20 years ago 25 years ago price control would have been slapped on immediately today at least we had some delay and there are exceptions to the controls that I don't believe there would have been 20 years ago I think that's because there's been a slight movement in the pro-freedom direction anti heavy handed regulatory state method but I'm not, I don't hold that prediction with any great degree of confidence, I by no means believe it to be true as some of my friends do incidentally that the victory of liberty is assured and all we have to do is sit around and wait I'm not a wig in that way so I mean if I believe it I'd go home I would turn my attentions to some other enterprise I do what I do, I enjoy doing what I do but I do what I do principally because I want to do whatever I can to help promote liberty and if I thought it was inevitable or futile, I quit Trig and Leon I think probably won't have time for you Stefan but you can stand by if you like go ahead Trig two comments, the first one a little funny you said I always think about how do I get to the young kids I'll give you an idea the idea is as an avid watcher of real TV and all the reality programs you may want to just suggest to them to grab a camcorder, go out be a producer of your own 16th century that hutch real TV watch the American kids watch the French kids all try to get along raising farm animals without very good steel equipment running water and so forth and it would be a great reality TV show and you make a lot of money to boot I had a very similar thought I think it's a good one it requires getting some funding to do one person said it would be so bad it would be so disgusting compared to reality TV today because these people are literally living in feces yes anyway go ahead that would be great reality TV we actually had a 1910 story where they took American family and had them live in a 1910 house 1900 house it's a terrific very very vivid you see the little girl getting a tamper tentrum but on the serious level in terms of high act type economics law junction I think we need to look in the mirror seriously on the environmental area and say that we have failed in coming up with essentially a tragedy of the commons problem we've failed and come up with laws private property laws and those laws that they need to just grab ad hoc from us for instance I'm concerned about the Bengal tiger I'm concerned about all the animals that are in the collective that are being exploited as somebody once at the Toronto convention explained there's no shortage or extinction of dogs cats and chickens those are happily privatized but you know the elephant rhino and the Bengal tiger they're out there suffering the tragedies of the commons but we don't seem to come up with the laws our legal scholars and our lawyers our libertarian legal scholars don't seem to come up with the laws to show how do you make property rights in water how do you make property rights in animals how do you make property rights in whole governments I think we've made some progress in that but I generally agree we haven't done as good a job as we can to show alternatives to the command and control state Thanks Jake. Stefan you get a chance after all Actually it's about the subject of convincing people speak right into the mic please about convincing people that's important to really get the same people who are now our opponents to move over this is perfectly possible that you might have me off as a book by Mr Townsend who was manager took over the Avis rental car company when it was almost failing completely and he moved it back up to become number two worldwide and he did it with exactly the same people he said the only thing he had to change was their motivation and because as soon as you get a certain number of people it doesn't matter which ones he choose because you will have an average anyway you have to do with those you actually deal with anyway so if you can properly motivate them you can move them from being losers to being winners we can do the same intellectually speaking we can take the current population who have socialist beliefs and if we properly motivate them we can turn them into perfect liberals actually in the classical sense so I think it can be done people can change it's perfectly possible but they have to get the right kind of motivation thanks for your comment I endorse that to the extent that we can do that obviously I think we should try I'm a little bit less optimistic than perhaps you are about being able to do that on a wide basis but I'll end with a story at least most Americans here know the man who ran for president in 1972 George McGovern far left at least by American standards far left sort of guy he loved government regulation loved high taxes I can't remember which state was McGovern from South Dakota after he retired from the US congress he returns to South Dakota and he's going to open up a bed and breakfast for visitors he was appalled at how hard he had to work at how high his taxes were extensive red tape regulation that he had to deal with and he actually said I think this was about 1988 or so he wrote in the Washington Post I believe was pretty certain it was the post he wrote how he never realized this until now and here's the man who spent his entire life in politics imposing regulations and taxes on people and not until he actually got into the real world and got differently motivated that he realized what he was doing to people thank you all very much